Definitely a reasonable question. Personally I would answer that by asking, “who uses intel for gaming”? Currently, very few, even less than AMD (lmao). Meaning the devs likely just don’t have one and can’t make any promises. I bet if someone bought them one they’d appreciate it ;)
I haven’t been following the arc cards very closely, but my loose impression was the drivers were heavily in flux until recently, and I’ve seen complications pop up in regards to mixtures of bios/uefi options, such as resizable bar being crucial for performance and some virtualization options causing incompatibility or performance issues. Basically the dust is still settling.
As such it’s hard to say “yeah this should work”.
I do think they should list the reasons why certain things are “not supported*, what “not supported” actually means, and not bury these surprises. Otherwise it guarantees confusion and (my wild but good faith) speculation.
The Arc cards are pretty good for DX12/Vulkan games, but pretty bad at DX9/11 games.
Luckily, the most popular Linux translation layers translate DX9/11 games into Vulkan. In fact, Intel is using such a translation layer on Windows and has significantly improved its performance that way.
The biggest issue still standing seems to be the lack of sparse resources support, but the Intel driver seems to be faking support to prevent games that don't actually use it from crashing in an upcoming update, fixing games like Elden Ring.
I think it's not a bad choice for an affordable Linux gaming rig depending on the games you play. Perhaps it's better to wait for Battlemage first, though. There's still a lot of tooling centered around AMD and Nvidia cards and the Intel drivers still aren't where they need to be if you need to play certain games.
Yeah just I noticed a few recent benchmarks and was kinda surprised. I definitely need to give them a better look.
That said, my own use case is a hilariously overcomplicated VM setup. I archive stuff for myself and help with other archival projects as a hobby, I realized the epyc machine I got for the PCIe lanes is basically perfect for sticking my “desktop” on a numa node and passing an AMD rx 6700xt. Host is currently proxmox, eventually moving to NixOS.
As such an important factor for me is good VFIO compatibility. AMD was supposed to be “it”, but they still have bizarre reset bugs show up in some of their latest models and have gone radio silent on the issue. My own reference card works fortunately, but there’s little telling if another kind will or not. And nvidia has all the typical out of kernel problems while the new drivers mature, but doesn’t have reset issues. Also I dislike Nvidia somewhat more than intel.
When I’m back on the market in a few years that will be the deciding factor. I’m definitely not a typical target market though.
The new Intel GPUs supposedly deliver pretty good value for money, they're around a geforce 1080 in performance or something? So that number might be increasing.
You can play a lot of indie games perfectly fine on integrated hardware
Ok, nVidia and it’s drivers - quite quirky, I know. I happen to have an AMD laptop nowadays but most of my life I had Intel (which felt very good although not powerful) and this sounds wild to me it wouldn't be sufficient to play a NES game.
Which is reasonable tbh, nvidia and it’s drivers are such a big stupid pain.